Good day everyone,
How was your summer? Have you discovered any narrative RPG gems?
Apart from moving back to Slovakia from Washington DC, where my wife’s research program concluded, I’ve managed to play some Banner Saga 3. It’s a worthy climax to the viking saga that proved that there is always room and desire for an original quality take on the RPG genre. Have you had a chance to check it out? What did you think?
We’ve also been saddened but the sudden demise of Telltale Games. Their choice-based narrative video games helped us to understand what builds and what breaks the immersion in storytelling games.
The finalization of the preview has proved to be a bit more work that expected, but we’re happy to say, that in the coming days we’ll be sending out invitations to the backers in the Firestarter tier and above.
It’s an early preview with the following features:
- final version of the first chapter (50,000 words)
- rewritten and improved scenes after your feedback (thank you!),
- 1,000+ choice checks with custom consequences for each failure,
- 200+ NPC reactions based on NPC probability checks,
- 39 risk chains from stealth situations and archery feats to mad escape sequences,
- 28 different endings (many of them result in your more or less violent death),
- first hand-crafted combat encounter with more than 10 psychological tactics,
- fully functional RPG mechanics with emotions based performance and impact of your choices on your character’s stats,
- character creation: choose attributes, traits,
- UI options to customize the experience – you can hide probabilities, tooltips and floating texts, which results in 3 modes: the intended RPG experience, adventure game mode and story only mode.
Current limitations:
- placeholder visuals and no audio,
- balancing needs some fine-tuning
You’ll receive an itch.io key and a Discord invitation. But first you’ll get an email with brief instructions from us in the coming days (if you’re in the Firestarter tier and above).
If you’re eligible (Firestarter tier and above) and don’t hear from us by email by October 5, please get in touch with me at martin@poeticstudio.com. There’s often a small percentage of emails we send that bounce for some reason.
Apart from that, we skipped Gamescom to focus on development. This means that the coding for the whole game is already finished (although some minor adjustments along the way will be inevitable). From now on it’s mostly about adding more content, but it’s also the most demanding part for the kind of game Sacred Fire is.
We can’t wait for your feedback to the preview. Thanks for being a part of this adventure, we couldn’t do it without you.
Martin